Theology

One of the Bible’s most refined literary and artistic works is the Gospel of John. In recent readings, it increasingly emerges as a gospel of decisive, personal encounters between the Lord Jesus and various individuals.

Fines, military ordinances, police and army patrolling the streets – this is the reality we have suddenly found ourselves living in. It is a tightening reality, a rigid corset-like structure of rules.

Jesus's words could not have been foreign to the Jewish people of His day. In an eminently oral culture, narratives, stories, parables and metaphors occupied an important place.

I am not an expert on the phenomenon of death. But like all of us, I have to live in its shadow, and watch the restlessness and greed it causes. The same gloomy reports that circle the planet also reach me. I feel especially conscious of this as COVID-19 claims its first victims in my country.

"Suppose I go to the Israelites…and they ask me, ‘What is his name?' Then what shall I tell them? God said to Moses, 'I AM who I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you'" (Exodus 3:13-14).

When I read “The Pitesti Phenomenon”, in my teens, I was bewildered by how cruel human nature can be. It was also then that I realized that being forced to renounce yourself, to bury your values and defining beliefs to become the reflection of a rotten system, to become inhuman is worse than being physically tortured.

I talked to Pastor Nicu Butoi about the role that religion could play in treating depression and hopelessness, at the end of a series of evangelistic presentations he gave to a full-house before the pandemic.

There has been a lot of speculation in the online environment about COVID-19 and the end of the world, but the connection between the two is more subtle than it first appears. It has been suggested that the pandemic is only the tip of the iceberg, that it is one of the seven last plagues of Revelation, or that it is the fourth...

I don’t remember ever doubting that, beyond the limits of the ensnaring, visible world, there is another reality that can only be accessed by those who speak the language of faith.

How can one explain that laws attributed to revelation are found in the legislation of other ancient peoples? How can the similarities between biblical thought and ancient culture be explained? How is the biblical God compared to the gods of other peoples?

Who was Jesus really? While His historical existence is no longer questioned, many people believe that He was at best an exceptional personality of His time, a reformer whom His disciples later transformed into a deity. Why is neo-atheism concerned with promoting such a Jesus, and why is He nothing more than a new form of doubt?

How did I begin to believe in You?

John the Baptist's call—"Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near"—succeeded in bringing Jews "from Jerusalem and all Judea and the whole region of the Jordan" to the desert where the prophet preached, to confess their sins and be baptised. Two thousand years later, the exhortation to "repent" is buried under a mountain of pejorative associations.

Whoever enters into a friendly dialogue with the will of God will never be the same person as before this dialogue. However, whatever one believes about God's will depends on their view of God's character and, therefore, on God's purpose for them.

In the opening scene of The Good Place, celestial being Michael (Ted Danson) explains that most world religions and philosophies get their respective understandings of the afterlife only about five per cent right.